We Are Our Stories and Our Stories Are Us

What are the perks of being human?

I was asked to answer the above question posted on Quora.com.

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Faces look at me sitting on a table in front of the room. Someone has just said things about me and now they stare, expectantly, wanting answers. 35 or so sitting there, in t-shirts and shorts or jeans. Nothing too flashy nothing to too trashy.

For over an hour in the classroom today and then some more over dinner I talked. Or rather I told stories.  Most of the stories were not mine. I borrowed them for this event.

The stories were essays others had written to get into schools with fancy names and big endowments. These essays both show and tell how a teen-ager can make the world they live in open doors.

Here is one of them:

Summer in Louisa is a lazy, Faulknerian season, loud with rolls of thunder as imposing as the voice of God. In the fall, gunshots of hunters boom from behind my bedroom window; in winter, they are silenced in small part due to state regulation, but it’s mostly the muffling effects of snowfall. In the spring, clouds like flayed salmon-bellies coast across the dimming Virginia sky.  Between my home and I-64 is a lumber mill that reeks at night of cedar and a gamy pestilence.

Across from the mill, a gravel driveway that leads to an unkempt double-wide is marked by a state sign that reads ‘Misery Road.’ Go a few miles up to find Louisa County High. Their mascot is the lion, and, every year during the homecoming game, they bring a downtrodden African lion onto the field. During the off-season, the lion is kept in a barn and satiated on juicy t-bone steaks from the local Wal-Mart, located at Louisa’s main drag - Zion Crossroads. Local lore used to have it if you went there at midnight, you found yourself face to face with Beelzebub. Nowadays, you’d just find yourself face to face with a strip mall and a couple of gas stations.

My hometown is its own brand of wild. Here, houses burn to the ground not because of Absalom, Absalom!’s Clytie, but because of crystal meth labs. Here, residents still wonder how the South could have lost the Civil War. It is in this nescience that I pluck stories like seeds from the cornfields. I plant them in the red dirt so that they may lean towards the light.
 

 

This short essay gives 'a local habitation and a name' to a tiny town few know and yet the words jump off the page and make poetry of a place. It’s stunningly smart and well written. It’s funny that the author of this this piece, which was written last year, just published a book yesterday. I also shared that another person, Anushay, who had been sitting in the chairs the 35 were in today, was on PBS tonight talking about the way women are treated in South Asia.

The 35 are part of a program called the Young Writers Workshop. The students are culled and selected from around the globe. They are talented storytellers who will get better with this experience. I was there to share some stories but after I talked I asked for theirs. I always come away with stories and sometimes I get to share them with others. Like the one above.

I am telling you this in answer to the question you asked me to answer because the perk of being human is pretty simple. We are, as a book says, a story telling animal. We have, since Homer (and long before) found ourselves through stories. We are our stories and our stories are/make us. Without them we cease to exist in time and memory. The Greeks worshiped Kleos, the fame that came not from the action of Achilles but from the epic that shared his actions. He lives on onlybecause of stories.

We live beyond our mortal lives because of stories. Some, like Shakespeare will live as long as we exist. Most of us will pass into dust without thinking we live on in some way but our names or some meme or some small little word may be carried around the globe in some form.

Even ants can communicate where food might be, but they can’t show the emotion pathos and tragedy or comedy that is life. Only we get the joy of crying when Juliet dies. Only we get to laugh at Chaplin’s tramp.

Stories are also mathematical formulas and scientific theories. They too will live on if they are useful or amuse us now that we have new stories (think of phlogiston).

Stories permit us to turn tragedy into art, turn our sad tales of woe into something that might get us help, turn our selves into selves and turn our selves into something far more than our mortal skin will ever be. Stories, the simple sounds and sentences, create the world for without them the rest, as Hamlet had it, would be silence. We live in a time when we are awash in stories most of them cliché-ridden and derivative but nevertheless human.

Each of is has great stories to tell. I have found this out by talking to people for many years. Some of us don't know what's hiding inside but I know that each us has something the will change the way we and others see and live in the world.

Today I shared a few that I hope will stick with the talented 35 I met today. I hope the stories I told will inspire them to tell their own epic adventure, or at least to create something that will sing and entertain and teach, even if only to themselves.

This is my story about a few hours from my day and I hope it will reach you and teach you and encourage you to ask questions on Quora and answer them too. We all learn from one another and that is a pretty damn good perk from where I sit.